September 5, 2025In this episode of the Reside Platform Podcast, host Suneet sits down with Mitch Braham, founder and CEO of Barham Marketing, to break down the overlooked marketing opportunities that real estate leaders need to pay attention to now. From why Reddit ads are one of the cheapest and most effective top-of-funnel channels, to how AI-driven search (AEO) is reshaping the way realtors generate leads, Mitch delivers actionable insights you can implement immediately. He also shares how TikTok helped his agency scale by $1M in one year without relying on hard CTAs, why authentic branding beats vanity metrics, and how to use long-tail keyword content to capture ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity leads. If you’re a driven team leader, brokerage owner, or high-performing agent looking to scale your production while keeping your freedom, this conversation is packed with practical strategies and growth hacks.
Chapters:
- 00:00:15 – Welcome to the Reside Platform Podcast
- 00:00:30 – Meet Mitch
- 00:00:51 – The Untapped Potential of Reddit Marketing
- 00:01:02 – Reddit’s Organic Power for AI and Search Engine Optimization
- 00:01:22 – Strategy: Running Low-Cost, High-Converting Paid Ads on Reddit
- 00:02:11 – Actionable Tip: How Realtors Can Target Ads on Reddit
- 00:03:14 – Shifting from Paid Ads to Organic Reddit Strategies
- 00:04:17 – A “Borderline Black Hat” Tactic for Ranking on Google via Reddit
- 00:06:04 – Pro Tip: Create and Control Your Own Subreddit for Your Business or Town
- 00:07:37 – Generating Leads from ChatGPT by Building Online Authority
- 00:09:09 – Defining AEO
- 00:09:44 – AEO Strategy: Creating Content Around Long-Tail Questions (7+ Words)
- 00:12:08 – Discussing the Role of YouTube in Lead Generation
- 00:14:33 – Exploring Organic Strategies on TikTok and Facebook
- 00:15:42 – TikTok Strategy: The Importance of Providing Value and a Strong Hook
- 00:17:00 – Using “Visual Hooks” to Stop the Scroll and Boost Engagement
- 00:18:05 – How Mitch Gained Inbound Leads Without Using Direct Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
- 00:20:09 – Employing “Soft CTAs” to Subliminally Guide Potential Clients
- 00:22:15 – Why Facebook is the Top Platform for Generating Revenue
- 00:23:34 – The Power of Facebook’s Older, More Financially Established Audience
- 00:25:00 – The Difficulty of Attributing Leads from Non-Follower Traffic
- 00:26:08 – Tracking Organic Leads with Bitly Links vs. Paid Leads with UTMs
- 00:28:03 – The Critical Importance of Building a Personal Brand
- 00:28:40 – The High Frequency of Daily Social Media Posting
- 00:30:31 – Current Facebook Trend: Text Posts with Colored Backgrounds Get the Most Reach
- 00:31:26 – The Mental Trap of Checking “Vanity Metrics”
- 00:33:53 – Be Authentic and True to Yourself
- 00:34:23 – Where to Find Mitch Barham Online
Links and Resources:
- Reside Platform
- Reside Platform Website
- Barham Marketing’s Website
- Mitch on LinkedIn
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to the Reside Platform Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube to leave us a review!
Episode breakdown: organic reach from Reddit, AI search and short video
Mitch Barham owns Barham Marketing, a digital marketing agency that runs ads across Google, Facebook and Reddit. He also posts his own content every day, and he says TikTok alone grew his agency a million dollars in one year through inbound leads. In this conversation with Suneet, he lays out where he sees cheap attention right now and how a real estate team can turn plain, useful answers into leads.
Treat Reddit as a local awareness channel
Mitch calls Reddit one of the most overlooked platforms, on both the paid and organic side. On paid, his agency has been getting sub $2 CPMs. The ads don’t look like ads because you pick the subreddit where they show up and the words someone might search. He’s clear that it won’t return four to six times your spend. It is top-of-funnel awareness that feeds everything else.
Reddit has its own keyword data in the backend, so a realtor can research terms for their town and find the local real estate or community subreddits to run ads in. On the organic side, he suggests using Reddit the way you’d use a Google Business Profile. Provide value, drop your name occasionally, and if your town has no community subreddit, create one. Whoever makes it moderates it. Most agents already have an assistant who could handle a couple of posts a day.
Write for the long questions people ask AI
Suneet has started seeing leads in his CRM with ChatGPT as the source. Mitch says that comes down to authority: years of press, blogs and a Google Business Profile that AI tools eventually pick up. One of his solar clients gets about 10 leads a week from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini without the agency trying.
The practical move is content built around long questions. People don’t type three words into ChatGPT. They write full sentences. Mitch’s method is to open Google Search Console, filter for queries of seven words or longer, and answer those questions in blog posts on your own site, in a question-and-answer format that mirrors how the AI tools respond. He likes schema markup but says the content itself matters more.
If you can create content around phrases or what we’ll still call key words, but like key words or questions that are like seven plus words. Those get eaten by GPT way more.
Mitch Barham
He applies the same idea to video. His newer long-form YouTube uploads each answer one question he knows people ask, such as why Facebook ads stopped working for a few days, in four or five minutes.
Open every short video with a visual hook
On TikTok, Mitch treats each video as an answer or a tip. His sister, a realtor in Spokane, followed his advice when she was starting out. She posted useful content on how to stage a home, how to pick a realtor and what red flags to watch for, across TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. She now works only off referrals. On Facebook, he says to post reels tagged to your town so they stay local.
The opening matters most. Pair a hard-hitting verbal hook with a visual one. His best performers start with three seconds of him combing his beard while he talks. Some viewers call it unprofessional in the comments, and that engagement pushes the video further. Sitting down, zooming in or putting on glasses all work the same way.
Use soft calls to action and track where leads come from
Mitch uses almost no hard calls to action. Instead he closes with a line about what his agency does for clients, and people who have followed him for a year reach out ready to work together. Those are the easiest sales calls he has. His quickest took nine minutes. For team leaders, he suggests turning a story about how you trained an agent into a short guide, then asking viewers to comment for the link and collecting their info on a landing page.
To know which platform is working, he puts Bitly links on each profile and UTM parameters on paid ads. On Facebook right now, short text posts on a colored background outperform his reels.
Make one video, then post it everywhere
At an agency mastermind, Mitch found most owners posting to one platform. He posts 18 times a day, twice on eight or nine platforms. The volume comes from repurposing. You make the video, send it out, turn it into written content, and split one topic into four smaller pieces.
People buy from people. People deal with people like they want to see you, they wanna like you. It makes every interaction so much better.
Mitch Barham
He admits he checks his own post insights too often. When a post gets 500 views and feels like a flop, he pictures standing in front of 500 people.
You don’t have to go mega viral. You just gotta get in front of the right person with the right message.
Mitch Barham
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Look for local and real estate subreddits in your market, and start a community subreddit if your town doesn’t have one.
- Filter Search Console for queries of seven words or longer and answer each one in a blog post on your site.
- Start every short video with a verbal hook and a visual one in the first few seconds.
- Close with a soft call to action, or offer a guide in exchange for a comment and an email.
- Put tracked links on every profile so you know which platform sends leads.
- Turn each video into several posts and written pieces across every platform you use.
